Cleaning The Bay

Volunteers Find Variety Of Trash

Dodging hundreds of fiddler crabs that scurried underfoot, 17 students and Virginia Institute of Marine Science staffers - armed with trash bags, sun block and bug repellent - trudged through the marsh and brush of the Catlett Islands Saturday collecting and classifying trash.

Like an estimated 5,000 others across Hampton Roads Saturday who participated in the 3rd Annual Clean the Bay Day, the volunteers on the islands, which are in the York River west of Gloucester Point, were seeing what kind of refuse they could collect in a three-hour period.

Along the shoreline at Buckroe Beach Saturday morning, a volunteer found a clear plastic kit later identified by fire officials as ``hazardous medical waste,'' said Kathy O'Hara, director of the pollution prevention program for the Center for Marine Conservation in Hampton.

O'Hara described the kit as small plastic sheet with ``bubble-like'' compartments. Two of the bubbles were intact, filled with green fluid, she said. On the back were instructions ``to test for blood'' and ``to test for tissue,'' O'Hara said.

While Chesapeake Bay and ocean cleanups have often yielded large appliances, car parts and medical waste, the shores of the York and other inland waterways are laid afoul mostly by careless boaters and outdoorsmen, said Carroll Curtis, director of the Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve System in Virginia at VIMS.

She predicted her troops would find crab baskets, motor oil jugs, bait boxes and beer cans. And they had gathered 732+ pounds of just that kind of debris by the time they finished and headed for the recycling center and the Gloucester County landfill, said Stephanie Leyland, VIMS education coordinator.

Two 26-foot boats transported the trash collectors from the VIMS pier at Gloucester Point upstream to the undeveloped islands.

The volunteers broke into teams of two or three, and were dropped off to assigned islands.

Graduate students Laura Grignano and Jiangang Luo, and Sandy Hartenstine, a staff marine scientist with VIMS, who formed Team One, gathered their sometimes smelly discoveries and stuffed them into garbage bags which were full a half hour before pick-up time was over.

Besides 72 empty cans of a wide range of the soft drink and beer brands made in the U.S., Team One recovered five Clorox bottles, one battered Chap Stick lip balm, a tennis ball, buoys, 37 styrofoam cups representing most of the major fast-food restaurants, a ping-pong ball, three rubber gloves, a light bulb, a magic marker and an onion sack - just for starters.

And a navy blue baseball hat with Williamsburg's Local 95 gold emblem on it.

They even came up with a little extra food. ``I found a can of sardines,'' Hartenstine called out with a chuckle, digging the can out of the mud.

Along the Virginia Beach strip and at Chick's Beach in Chesapeake, condoms were the plentiful find of volunteers clearing the beach, said Beth Lang, zone coordinator for Virginia Beach, where Clean the Bay Day operations - which yielded more than 55 tons of debris - were based.

Other VIMS teams reported finding a headless duck decoy and a toilet seat. In Hampton, the wildest finds were a Guns and Roses cassette and a ``great ice cube tray'' described by O'Hara as ``pornographic.'' The cubes were cutouts of women and their breasts.